The current specification for the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (3GPP LTE) provides a Cell Range Expansion (CRE) technique for increasing the time a User Equipment (UE) remains connected to a small cell by decreasing the downlink signal strength constraint associated with cell selection/reselection. The conventional CRE approach promotes off-loading of a UE from a macro cell to a small cell, thereby saving macro cell bandwidth and potentially providing better throughput and power performance for the UE. Nevertheless, the conventional CRE approach does not account for factors such as the speed of a UE and/or the balance of downlink/uplink traffic being experienced by the UE. Consequently, the conventional CRE approach can cause situations in which an ongoing data and/or voice session can be interrupted and/or in which macro-cell/small-cell system performance is not optimized.
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